The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol
laugh. Meanwhile, let’s light a candle and offer a laxative to Our Holy Child of Agro, who seems to need it urgently so that we don’t continue being dirtied with reality as it presents itself to us in its ordinary way.
The situation that I describe happened twenty years ago. Sometime after it occurred, Sergio Pitol dazzled us with the appearance of three memorable books whose genre it is hard to describe. Between narrative nonfiction, diary, essay, and fiction: The Art of Flight, The Journey, and The Magician of Vienna. Principally in the last of those, The Magician of Vienna, this new undefined and unique genre of Sergio Pitol’s reaches one of its peaks. Life narration, travel stories, notes from a diary the deliriums of a feverous and, therefore, brilliant mind. But it is at this time when life returns many of the stratagems that he used in his most delirious fictions to the author, Sergio Pitol. It is then that the prophetic character of the illuminated one’s writing becomes reality: Sergio Pitol gradually begins to lose his speech. It begins with the forgetting of a word in a certain circumstance. The author is capable of forgetting, for example, the word wine and is, nevertheless, capable of recounting the history of wine, from its most remote origins, just for the purpose of finding it. The prophecy present in his books advances. Not just words but entire phrases become absent. Then the surrounding reality also begins to transform itself. Life is one more scene from The Magician of Vienna. The author loses his faculty of writing, the dogs age and go blind, harmful beings settle around him. The author trapped in his own fiction. Suffering a process of regression, where he himself comes to be the personification of the child that comes into view in “Victorio Ferri Tells a Tale,”2 or in the passage where he discovers, fifty years after the fact, that his mother died by drowning in a river and his younger sister died from her sadness at the loss. Nothing of that writing remains but the ghost of writing itself. The halo of the admired creator, the master of life, the creator that marked the trail to follow. The curse, in other words—I repeat it—of the genius transformed into a Prophet of the twenty-first century. We can read The Magician of Vienna not just as a work of literature but as one of the Holy Books in which we store humanity’s imaginary.
Translated by David Shook
1 Sergio Pitol’s Carnival Triptych consists of the novels El desfile del amor [Love’s Parade, 1984], Domar a la divine garza [Taming the Divine Heron, 1989], and La vida conyugal [Married Life, 1991], which will be published in English for the first time by Deep Vellum in 2018. Of interest, the three volumes of Pitol’s Trilogy of Memory, written and published in the decade following the Carnival Triptych, of which The Magician of Vienna is the third and final volume, following The Art of Flight and The Journey, recount stories of Pitol’s life lived through literature and each one contains the genesis of Pitol’s inspiration for the corresponding novel in the Carnival Triptych. — Ed.
2 Reference to the first short story Pitol ever published in 1957, which appeared in English translation for the first time in Gulf Coast only in 2016. It is included in the English translation of Pitol’s Collected Best Stories, forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2017. — Ed.
Only connect…
E. M. FORSTER
THE MIMETIC APE. Reading Alfonso Reyes revealed to me, at the appropriate time, an exercise recommended by one of his literary idols, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art, consisting of an imitation exercise.1 He himself had practiced it with success during his apprenticeship. The Scottish author compared his method to the imitative aptitude of monkeys. The future writer should transform himself into an ape with a high capacity for imitation, should read his preferred authors with an attention closer to tenacity than delight, more in tune with the activity of the detective than the pleasure of the aesthete; he should learn by which means to achieve certain results, to detect the efficacy of some formal processes, to study the handling of narrative time, tone, and the organization of details in order to apply those devices later to his own writing; a novel, let us say, with a plot similar to that of the chosen author, with comparable characters and situations, where the only liberty allowed would be the employment of his own language: his, that of his family and friends, perhaps his region’s—“the great school of training and imitation,” added Reyes, “of which the truly original Lope de Vega speaks in La Dorotea:
How do you compose? I read,
and what I read, I imitate,
and what I imitate, I write,
and what I write, blot out,
and then I sift the blottings-out.”2
An indispensable education, provided the budding writer knows to jump from the train at the right moment, to untie whatever tethers him to the chosen style as a starting point, and knows intuitively the right moment at which to embrace everything that writing requires. By then he must know that language is the decisive factor, and that his destiny will depend on his command of it. When all is said and done, it will be style—that emanation of language and of instinct—that will create and control the plot.
When in the mid-fifties I began to sketch my first stories, two languages exercised control over my fledgling literary vision: that of Borges and that of Faulkner. Their splendor was such that, for a time, they overshadowed all others. That subjugation allowed me to ignore the telluric risks of the time, the monotone costumbrismo and the false modernity of the narrative prose of the Contemporáneos, to whose poetry, at the same time, I was addicted. In this splendid group of poets, some—Xavier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, Salvador Novo—also excelled for their essays. They had availed themselves during their early years of the lessons of Alfonso Reyes and of Julio Torri. Nevertheless, when they made incursions into the short story, they inevitably failed. They believed they were repeating the brilliant effects of Gide, Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Bontempelli, whom they venerated, as a means of escaping the rancho, the tenebrous jungle, the mighty rivers, and they succeeded, but at the expense of careening into tedium and, at times, into the ridiculous. The effort was obvious, the seams were too visible, the stylization became a parody of the European authors in whose shadow they sought refuge. If someone ordered me today, pistol in hand, to reread the Proserpina rescatada [Rescued Prosperpina]3 by Jaime Torres Bodet, I would probably prefer to be felled by bullets than plunge into that sea of folly.
I must have been seventeen when I first read Borges. I remember the experience as if it happened just a few days ago. I was traveling to Mexico City after spending a holiday in Córdoba with my family. The bus made a stop in Tehuacán for lunch. It was Sunday so I bought a newspaper: the only thing about the press that interested me at the time was the cultural supplement and the theater and movie guide. The supplement was the legendary México en la Cultura, arguably the best there has ever been in Mexico, under the direction of Fernando Benítez. The main text in that edition was an essay on the Argentine fantastical short story signed by the Peruvian writer José Durand. Two stories appeared as examples of Durand’s theses: “The Horses of Abdera” by Leopoldo Lugones and “The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges, a writer completely foreign to me. I began with the fantastical tale by Lugones, an elegant example of postmodernismo, and proceeded to “The House of Asterion.” It was, perhaps, the most stunning revelation in my life as a reader. I read the story with amazement, with gratitude, with absolute astonishment. When I reached the final sentence, I gasped. Those simple words: “‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ Theseus said. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended himself,”4 spoken as if in passing, almost at random, suddenly revealed the mystery that the story concealed: the identity of the enigmatic protagonist, his resigned sacrifice. Never had I imagined that our language could reach such levels of intenseness, levity, and surprise. The next day, I went out in search of other books by